Actually just the opposite. Recently got a script for a strong narcotic and counted the pills the next day. It was short one pill. Since this is kept in the safe the Pharmacist manually filled it. An auto counter wouldn't have shorted me.

The number of people who think that creating inefficiency is good for the economy is astounding. It's sad that after the industrial revolution and the computer fueled economic boom of the 90s that we still have to have this conversation.

meanmutton:The number of people who think that creating inefficiency is good for the economy is astounding. It's sad that after the industrial revolution and the computer fueled economic boom of the 90s that we still have to have this conversation.

Automation seems to be similar to trade - they benefit the economy but not necessarily society. Freer trade has made the US much wealthier as a whole but the bottom 80% aren't getting bigger slices of the pie. Unions are the market-oriented counterbalance to power asymmetry but they've been thrashed so thoroughly by the rentier class and their legislators that government-mandated wealth redistribution is the only option remaining. And you can see how popular that is.

Greed and myopia are capitalism's worst enemies and we've long since forgotten the lessons of the Gilded Age..

Incontinent_dog_and_monkey_rodeo:Soon we'll have electricity with no fuel inputs from wind and solar, and robots to make anything we need. Good times, unless you're dead set on everyone having a job of some sort.

meanmutton:The number of people who think that creating inefficiency is good for the economy is astounding. It's sad that after the industrial revolution and the computer fueled economic boom of the 90s that we still have to have this conversation.

Incontinent_dog_and_monkey_rodeo:Soon we'll have electricity with no fuel inputs from wind and solar, and robots to make anything we need. Good times, unless you're dead set on everyone having a job of some sort.

That doesn't mean that people won't have jobs. It just changes the types of jobs that people have. Frankly, automation typically replaces the jobs that are the most repetitive and least rewarding anyways. Few people lament the loss of office steno pools. Or floors of accountants with adding machines.

Besides, even where these jobs still do exist, they're entirely outsourced to cheap labour countries anyways.

CaptSS:Actually just the opposite. Recently got a script for a strong narcotic and counted the pills the next day. It was short one pill. Since this is kept in the safe the Pharmacist manually filled it. An auto counter wouldn't have shorted me.

Your "pharmacist" thinks you're a little punk-ass biatch, and is shorting you intentionally to see how far he can push you. This is not something you can fix, because dealers never respect their clients--it's just a question of how much disrespect they have. Go back to him for a refill, and you'll be short two pills, and half of the rest will say "Advil" on them.

Find another dealer, and make a big show of being strung out and crazy paranoid. Count the pills seventeen times while muttering to yourself in gibberish. The idea is to make it more of a hassle to cheat you than it's worth.

unyon:Incontinent_dog_and_monkey_rodeo: Soon we'll have electricity with no fuel inputs from wind and solar, and robots to make anything we need. Good times, unless you're dead set on everyone having a job of some sort.

That doesn't mean that people won't have jobs. It just changes the types of jobs that people have. Frankly, automation typically replaces the jobs that are the most repetitive and least rewarding anyways. Few people lament the loss of office steno pools. Or floors of accountants with adding machines.

Besides, even where these jobs still do exist, they're entirely outsourced to cheap labour countries anyways.

They're even disappearing in the third world. I spent a year in middle-of-nowhere Mexico a while back automating Juan and Jose's jobs out of existence too.

Incontinent_dog_and_monkey_rodeo:Soon we'll have electricity with no fuel inputs from wind and solar, and robots to make anything we need. Good times, unless you're dead set on everyone having a job of some sort.

Sounds like a recipe for a post-scarcity culture. Why would we need jobs?

detroitdoesntsuckthatbad:unyon: Incontinent_dog_and_monkey_rodeo: Soon we'll have electricity with no fuel inputs from wind and solar, and robots to make anything we need. Good times, unless you're dead set on everyone having a job of some sort.

That doesn't mean that people won't have jobs. It just changes the types of jobs that people have. Frankly, automation typically replaces the jobs that are the most repetitive and least rewarding anyways. Few people lament the loss of office steno pools. Or floors of accountants with adding machines.

Besides, even where these jobs still do exist, they're entirely outsourced to cheap labour countries anyways.

They're even disappearing in the third world. I spent a year in middle-of-nowhere Mexico a while back automating Juan and Jose's jobs out of existence too.

I was gonna do a "You bastard!" joke, but honestly, it's not that any of these people are losing jobs, they're getting trained to do other things -mostly maintenance- so that they can keep them around. Not sure if they're doing the same thing in China, but I'm guessing they do.

Funny thing is, creative jobs are the ones that are kinda keeping the human part -so far-. I mean, AutoCAD was the first attempt to remove engineers and architects from the loophole, and now it's a common tool (that is slowly dying, replaced by other better software).

Step 1. Automation replaces assembly jobs as robots churn out product X 24/7.Step 2. Every competitor in the market segment completes upgrading their lines to use robots to churn out product X.Step 3. No-one wants to have a price-war and watch their profit margin evaporate, so everyone researches and develops specializations and customizations.Step 4. Customization, complexity and specialization *becomes* the market.

Look at Detroit. Automation killed some wrech-turning jobs, sure. But it spawned thousands more cad/cam/cnc type jobs-- to design, build and service specialized parts that were economically infeasible before automation made it cheap and easy to bang out the base unit.

That's the real reason cars became so computer-controlled and optimized that an old school mechanic can hardly fix anything anymore.It's because they *could*. Robots can consistently achieve the tolerances necessary. Robots can deliver more-complex parts at almost no additional cost. Robots can work with materials that people can't even safely be *around* for an eight hour shift.

And, ultimately, because there's no profit in turning out a car with an old-school engine design when everyone else has a smaller, lighter, cheaper, smarter computer-controlled engine that gets better mileage, more horsepower, superior longevity, lower TCO, etc.

CygnusDarius:detroitdoesntsuckthatbad: unyon: Incontinent_dog_and_monkey_rodeo: Soon we'll have electricity with no fuel inputs from wind and solar, and robots to make anything we need. Good times, unless you're dead set on everyone having a job of some sort.

That doesn't mean that people won't have jobs. It just changes the types of jobs that people have. Frankly, automation typically replaces the jobs that are the most repetitive and least rewarding anyways. Few people lament the loss of office steno pools. Or floors of accountants with adding machines.

Besides, even where these jobs still do exist, they're entirely outsourced to cheap labour countries anyways.

They're even disappearing in the third world. I spent a year in middle-of-nowhere Mexico a while back automating Juan and Jose's jobs out of existence too.

I was gonna do a "You bastard!" joke, but honestly, it's not that any of these people are losing jobs, they're getting trained to do other things -mostly maintenance- so that they can keep them around. Not sure if they're doing the same thing in China, but I'm guessing they do.

Funny thing is, creative jobs are the ones that are kinda keeping the human part -so far-. I mean, AutoCAD was the first attempt to remove engineers and architects from the loophole, and now it's a common tool (that is slowly dying, replaced by other better software).

I would agree to a certain point. When you're paying 0.85$ an hour to begin with you really aren't saving any on labor when you automate. Instead your gains come from efficiency and quality. Those workers your displacing are staying on for the most part but shifting to per non-critical activities. It is essentially removing all job security though because they are now a (virtually) non-income producing line item.

unyon:Incontinent_dog_and_monkey_rodeo: Soon we'll have electricity with no fuel inputs from wind and solar, and robots to make anything we need. Good times, unless you're dead set on everyone having a job of some sort.

That doesn't mean that people won't have jobs. It just changes the types of jobs that people have. Frankly, automation typically replaces the jobs that are the most repetitive and least rewarding anyways. Few people lament the loss of office steno pools. Or floors of accountants with adding machines.

Besides, even where these jobs still do exist, they're entirely outsourced to cheap labour countries anyways.

That's the standard economic wisdom, and I agree. But there's a wrinkle - if automation gets good enough we could violate a core assumption of economics: local nonsatiation.

To unpack that for non-wonks: It's assumed that human want is much greater than productive capacity, so there will always be enough work to go around, doing *something*. E.g. as factory jobs disappear (robots have largely taken those already) we get more yoga instructors. But what happens once we have good enough automation for not only yoga instruction, but, say, surgery? Programming? Robot design?

I'm glad to see mainstream economists taking this up, Krugman in particular because you know he cares about the accompanying distributional issues. If you dropped such automation into today's US economy, you'd end up with the developer essentially owning the whole economy, with the population left to starve. For an amateur treatment of those distributional issues, see Marshall Brain's "Manna" - a handful of hyper-rich and everyone else living in welfare dorms (which is, if you think about it, a stronger safety net than today). Like in "Manna"'s Australia, if you have good materials / energy / recycling technologies to go along you can go right to a "post-scarcity" economy, of which there are plentiful models. But if labor ceases to be scarce before those other factors of production, we get the problem under discussion.

Soon we'll have electricity with no fuel inputs from wind and solar, and robots to make anything we need. Good times, unless you're dead set on everyone having a job of some sort.

Sounds like a recipe for a post-scarcity culture. Why would we need jobs?

Most work is make work. How many fast food restaurants do we need, let alone McDonald's cashiers? Any job that can be easily automated away should be.

On the other hand, our society is rich enough for every American citizen to be provided with basic food, clothing, shelter and health care; those jobs that remain should go those who have to do something with their time, who have more to offer Society than the average person and/or want those nifty consumer goods we see advertized all the time. (Very few preople really need an iPad, for example.)

We'd also include breeding restrictions and "family planning," a great education for those who want it and a strong incentive to join the military or do some kind of National Service upon turning 18.

The upper levels would be meritocratic, and nothing but DNA would be inheritable.

Of course this would take a drastic rethink and involve some redistribution of wealth, power and resources. It would be simpler just to nuke the big metro areas from orbit.

They both miss the point. The point is the taker class, bankers, entrepreneurs, lawyers, politicians, and bureaucrats, have taken the profits that come from increased productivity and given nothing back for the last 30 years. Wages stagnated because they robbed the maker class of the increase in wage that should have occurred with the increase in productivity.

stirfrybry:Incontinent_dog_and_monkey_rodeo: Soon we'll have electricity with no fuel inputs from wind and solar, and robots to make anything we need. Good times, unless you're dead set on everyone having a job of some sort.

tell me how robots make food

Tell me how people make food? How much planting and harvesting is done with machinery? How much of a stretch is it to automate that?

There's an old SF short story, Heinlein maybe, where robots (drones) do all the killing, and get so expensive that someone 'discovers' that having humans pilot your planes/tanks/etc is a lot cheaper.

CSB, in college, I worked as a driver for a small family pharmacy, and they got an automated dispenser - it was wrong about 25% of the time. Might have been the idiot techs loading or programming it wrong, also it was 15 years ago. I suck.

Gaseous Anomaly: "But what happens once we have good enough automation for not only yoga instruction, but, say, surgery? Programming? Robot design?"

There's no indication that it's possible to create a free-thinking robot.There's no indication that we are capable of creating free-thinking robots.There's no indication that a free-thinking robot would have the drive to create.There's no indication that a free-thinking, creative robot would have the drive to create on human time-scales.(If you can just be downloaded into a new body, ad infinitum, why rush to make an intermediate version of something when you can just 'mentally' iterate for a few decades to get arbitrarily close to an ideal design?)There's no indication that a free-thinking, motivated, creative robot would tolerate being pressed into slavery.(And if ownership is anything less than guaranteed, who would go to the expense of creating these robots en mass?)

And how would a generation of free-thinking, motivated, creative, free and autonomous robots be any different, economically, than a generation of particularly gifted children?And how would their own "children" be, economically, any different from human population growth?

Dystopian economic visions of an automated future require a particularly odd confluence of assumptions about what automation looks like. It requires robots be human enough to displace design, art and service, but not so human as to recognize their slavery nor to recognize the injustice of creating a permanent two-tier society. And we may not know what it is to be human, or where art truly comes from - but it sure sounds like a contradiction to suppose something that's both *creative* and ignorant of free will and/or lacks any desire for self-determination.

The problem lies in the ideology that corporations should be governed to"maximize shareholder value," which became prevalent in boardrooms and business schools in the 1980s, and has become totally dominant since.I don't think that's the only thing that changed in the '80s.

meanmutton:The number of people who think that creating inefficiency is good for the economy is astounding. It's sad that after the industrial revolution and the computer fueled economic boom of the 90s that we still have to have this conversation.

What we did to get over that order-of-magnitude improvement in efficiency was market, market, market, to get the consumer to buy an order of magnitude more stuff. Roughly ten times more 'stuff' for a 1990s lifestyle over a 1910s lifestyle.

The problem is whether we can successfully convince people to consume yet another order of magnitude more stuff. I'm owning and buying less every year personally. And I'm pretty flipping satiated. Leaving aside environmental considerations (to the extent that goods are physical), there's only so many hours in the day to consume media or use products. Meanwhile, we have more stuff in more ministorage lockers than any other civilization in history. And a quarter of the nation has to pop antidepressants to deal with it.

Towermonkey: "There's an old SF short story, Heinlein maybe, where robots (drones) do all the killing, and get so expensive"

That's a hallmark 1950s projection flaw: assuming increased technology ~= increased expense.They couldn't have known -- hell, it sounds like a goddamm violation of the second law of thermodynamics -- but history has shown that as things get more advanced, they get smaller, smarter, more efficient but they also get cheaper.

So we'd actually expect the dominating cost in future drone warfare to be the explosives, not the drones.And a human could likely never deliver enough bombs to target to offset the fertilizer used to grow their food. To say nothing of the extra fuel used to get them and their life-support considerations from "home" to "target". Drones don't even need *basing*. They'll either be delivered via submarine carrier or orbital drop.

The problem lies in the ideology that corporations should be governed to"maximize shareholder value," which became prevalent in boardrooms and business schools in the 1980s, and has become totally dominant since.I don't think that's the only thing that changed in the '80s.

You have one with median or mean as well? Top's interesting but not very big-picture.

ProfessorOhki:stirfrybry: Incontinent_dog_and_monkey_rodeo: Soon we'll have electricity with no fuel inputs from wind and solar, and robots to make anything we need. Good times, unless you're dead set on everyone having a job of some sort.

tell me how robots make food

Tell me how people make food? How much planting and harvesting is done with machinery? How much of a stretch is it to automate that?

Yup. Already happening. Virtually all the grain crops in the midwest are both planted and harvested by GPS piloted tractors. The only time the driver takes control is to turn the tractor or combine (harvester) around at the end of the rows.

detroitdoesntsuckthatbad:They're even disappearing in the third world. I spent a year in middle-of-nowhere Mexico a while back automating Juan and Jose's jobs out of existence too.

Of that I have no doubt. Mexico's problem is that they're not the cheapest labour on the block anymore.

Gaseous Anomaly:That's the standard economic wisdom, and I agree. But there's a wrinkle - if automation gets good enough we could violate a core assumption of economics: local nonsatiation.

To unpack that for non-wonks: It's assumed that human want is much greater than productive capacity, so there will always be enough work to go around, doing *something*. E.g. as factory jobs disappear (robots have largely taken those already) we get more yoga instructors. But what happens once we have good enough automation for not only yoga instruction, but, say, surgery? Programming? Robot design?

An interesting theoretical discussion, but the trend doesn't bear it out.

In all of human history, in all of the post-industrial automation, this has yet to be a problem. Less than 150 years ago, 9 out of 10 jobs were agrarian. Now that number is a sliver of a percent. Those jobs were also very long hours, and every day. That shift away from the farm and away from agrarian rural life represents the largest shift in human productivity since we shifted to it 10,000 years ago.

Not only has the type of job changed, but our commitment to that productivity on a time basis has changed. How we define 'work' and 'productivity' is an equally important part of that discussion.

A pre-industrial person couldn't begin to imagine the jobs that would be available post-revolution. Similarly, you and I (and Krugman, and Lazonik) are like those 1890's farmers lamenting the loss of agricultural work, but without the benefit of having even imagined a car (or a tractor!). Is it possible for us to arrive at a day where no jobs are left? Sure. But humans don't seem to have a problem with leisure, either. Lions have become such efficient hunters that they now spend 95% of their lives laying in the grass having a nap. That sort of efficiency doesn't strike me so much as a bug as a feature.

So apart from us not being particularly good predictors of future wants, needs, and possibilities (in your economic terms I guess that would be satiation), you'd also have to be able to define productivity in more strict terms. It's fair to say that westerners 'do less' than they have at any time in history, but never have we made more (assumed productivity) or consumed more. You're right that that curve isn't infinite- there is a non-theoretical limit to available resources, but we've not hit those yet. Even when we do, they'll just make the goods we've now deemed desirable to become more scarce.

I'm also not sure what to make of things like the artisanal movement- clearly, people are prepared to spend enormous effort to make things of higher perceived quality, and there also appears to be an unsatisfied market for those goods. Given that consumers are easily manipulated, even when we don't necessarily have scarcity, humans find ways to create scarcity. 100 years ago, there wasn't a market for deodorant or mouthwash, even though there was B.O. and bad breath. Post-scarcity assumes that we are post-consumer. I don't see humans being wired that way, at all.

Then there is the wallmartification effect- goods that are cheap and plentiful and of low quality, but are forcing incredible efficiencies in the production, shipping, distribution, and tracking of goods.

Does this end up with the wealth solely concentrated at the top, like in your Manna example? It certainly doesn't hurt to be a Walmart shareholder. But for others, does it merely create the free time, capital, and space in the economy for other sorts of activity to occur that were previously unfeasible?

I'm a pretty big fan of an organic model. The canopy of towering trees in the rainforest might appear to be blocking out all of the sunlight on the forest floor. But they are a big part of establishing the habitat for a wealth of other activity. Dinosaurs got big and unwieldy and created room for small, nimble mammals. I see the overgrowth of massive corporations and upward wealth consolidation having the similar effects economically. The world, and the economy, is changing too quickly for these large behemoths to be able to respond properly to crises. The fact that this article illustrates that the investments in innovation isn't happening at the top is a pretty good example.

The buyback trend, like the consolidation trend, is indicative of an unsustainable growth model. We're not seeing a brave new world, we're seeing the first death throes.

The problem lies in the ideology that corporations should be governed to"maximize shareholder value," which became prevalent in boardrooms and business schools in the 1980s, and has become totally dominant since.I don't think that's the only thing that changed in the '80s.

You have one with median or mean as well? Top's interesting but not very big-picture.

unyon:Does this end up with the wealth solely concentrated at the top, like in your Manna example? It certainly doesn't hurt to be a Walmart shareholder. But for others, does it merely create the free time, capital, and space in the economy for other sorts of activity to occur that were previously unfeasible?

Hmmm. In basic capitalism we'd have the robot-owners (hereafter called "the Waltons") owning literally everything, and everyone else starving or maybe subsistence-farming. But now that I think of it, the governmental structures that would support the Waltons' ownership claims would likely crumble long before that point. But in anarchy, the Waltons would likely become feudal lords after a struggle...